Can you have beans without ummm… side effects? Yes, it is possible! The key is in the proper soaking and rinsing of the beans prior to cooking.
These beans are the base of many recipes in Nourishing Traditions. I make these about once a year, make them into refried beans and also leave some whole, and freeze them in jars. The whole beans I use in minestrone soup, chicken tortilla soup or other vegetable soups. The refried beans we use on a weekly basis with tacos or as a side dish to enchiladas. The girls even use them for impromptu nachos when I don’t feel like cooking for a night. Easy and inexpensive!
When prepared correctly, beans do not have to contribute much to… ummm… flatulence. In fact, we don’t notice it at all when I soak pintos for 48 hours and follow the procedure below.
Say hello to beans again!!
Tips for making Basic Beans
- You can use this same process for different types of dried beans. I use pinto but you may prefer black beans.
- Do NOT salt or season the beans until they are soft. Salting the beans will cause them to stay hard and it’s difficult to get them soft after they’re seasoned.
- For larger beans, you can soak up to 48 hours. For best results change the warm water after one day. I do this with pintos and have a great result.
- Never use the soaking water, and always rinse your beans. Also removing the foam while cooking will reduce or even eliminate ‘side effects’.
Basic Pinto Beans
Rating: 3 forks (key) Hubby doesn’t prefer beans but the girls and I thrive on them
Difficulty:
Easy
Page in NT: 496
Ingredients:
2 cups black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, white beans or black-eyed peas
warm filtered water
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
4 cloves garlic, peeled and mashed (optional)
sea salt and pepper
Preparation:
Cover beans with warm water. Stir in baking soda and leave in a warm place for 12-24 hours, depending on the size of the bean. Drain, rinse, place in a large pot and add water to cover beans. Bring to a boil and skim off foam. Reduce heat and add optional garlic. Simmer, covered, for 4-8 hours. Check occasionally and add more water as necessary. Season to taste after beans are soft.
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{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
This is interesting. I didn’t realise baking soda could be used for soaking beans. I just assumed all soaking of grains and beans etc should be with whey or vinegar etc.. something acidic. I thought baking soda was alkaline. I wonder why this is?
I have soaked my beans this way too, and the results are fabulous.
Grains and seeds are soaked with something acidic but that doesn’t work for beans. I remember the Indian mother of a colleague telling me that she always soaks beans with baking soda and that makes them digestible (she lives in India). So, that is apparently how traditional societies prepare beans.
So I guess the pressure cooker I bought to cook my soaked beans is out? Bummer…
I love the little tips you share on batch cooking. Extremely helpful. Giving this method a whirl with a batch of chickpeas
When you say you make a big batch once a year, how many pounds of bean is that if you don’t mind me asking? I just made 2 pounds for a week (3 meals). So, if I made enough for a year…at one time…that’s over 100 pounds of beans?!
Does this work for garbanzo beans and lentils as well?
i’ve always soaked my legumes overnight (with the possible exceptions of red lentils, because they need so little cooking time anyway). while i know that my grandmother used to discard the soaking water (and older cookbooks advise this too), i later read somewhere that you should keep it and use it to cook the beans in, as discarding the soaking water would mean missing out on some washed-out proteins, and also saponins or something that was supposed to be good for you — unfortunately i forget now exactly what it was, and what it was supposed to do.
maybe you know more — does NT say anything about this?
Yes NT does say something about this… the SOAKING water should DEFINITELY be discarded. However the COOKING water can be kept. The soaking water has all the impurities and phytic acid in it. If you put this water in your food, you will notice the difference in bloating & side effects. If you drain the soaking water and rinse the beans and then cook them in fresh water, you can keep that water. The cooking water will also have a ton of flavor. I think it tastes better than the soaking water actually.
I have a homemade soup restaurant that I like, and I tried to eat their bean soups, but had bad side effects. I asked them how they soak/cook their beans and they said that they always use the soaking water because it has ‘flavor’. That may be true, but it also has the bad stuff that you don’t want. I now only eat non-bean soup from that place.
thanks for the quick answer! i made the first bean soup in years *without* the soaking water this weekend, and i immediately noticed the difference. there still was plenty of flavour, but next to no bloating at all. fabulous!
i also assume that whatever benefits i might have from the saponins in the soaking water, they would be counteracted by the phytic acid — a substance i never even was aware of until two months ago, and already i feel it’s made a world of difference.
Hello,
I just discovered your blog via Flickr while I was looking for CC pics of legumes for a blog post I want to write in my cooking blog (sorry, it’s in French) and I’m quite new to flexitarianism (part-time vegetarianism).
I already knew about not keeping the soakng water because of the side effects, so I always discard it after I soaked my yellow peas (when I make pea soup with ham cooking water) or my white beans (for traditional sweet beans like we do in Québec). But I recently got a tip from a flexitarian blogger about cooking beans/peas while having as much flavor as canned legumes : she told me that she puts onion, garlic cloves and herbs in the cooking water, and she puts salt only at the end. So I did it with my chickpeas and it did a lot of differences : the onion, garlic, herbs and broth gave taste to them. That’s very nice when you can make them as tasty as canned legumes, for dry beans/peas/lentils are so inexpensive compared to canned legumies : a one-pound bag of dry chickpeas cost only about 50 cents to one dollar higher than a 19oz can while I can make 8 bags of 1 cup and half of cooked chickpeas.
And about the garlic cloves, I always remove the germ because if I don’t do so, I burp garlic for hours with heartburn sensations, because the garlic germ’s bitterness doesn’t go away, unlike the outer part, during cooking.
And I kept the cooking water to make a rice-noodle-vegetables soup. Anyway, when we make our traditional pea soup, the soup contains the cooking water.
But I’ll follow your tip about adding baking soda for beans, the next time I soak white or red beans to prepare ready-to-use servings.
PS : Sorry if some terms might seem inaccurate, English isn’t my mother tongue, I actually speak French as my mother tongue.
I recently came across your site and am very excited to have found this resource! I just checked my beans after 1.5 hours of cooking, and they are already mushy. I had them on the smallest burner over very low heat. Has this happened with anyone else, or do they usually take 4-8 hours?